


While The High Queen's Lady

by Katherine



Category: The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morgaine's strange pretense was being a maiden here at the High King's court and never having been a mother. She was now at Caerleon as one of Gwenhyfar's ladies, dwelling under Gwenhyfar's stifling ideal of purity. Morgaine felt...</p>
            </blockquote>





	While The High Queen's Lady

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ennyousai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennyousai/gifts).



Morgaine's strange pretense was being a maiden here at the High King's court and never having been a mother. She was now at Caerleon as one of Gwenhyfar's ladies, dwelling under Gwenhyfar's stifling ideal of purity. Morgaine felt she began almost to lose her own knowledge of life's tides. Having left Orkney meant a relief at least from Lot's lechery, yet now and again she missed Morgause.  
  
On the road from Avalon she had not had a clear vision of what awaited her in Orkney. Morgaine thought her aunt Morgause would take her in, as indeed she had offered to. But Morgaine sensed that Lot schemed. She had more immediate concerns on the long road north as well. Some few times, when she encountered men and felt the shape of trouble, she used a priestess-trick to bid them pass by her. The first time she did not feel certain about using her magic thus. Nor even did she know if she still could, at a distance from Avalon. She had after all laid down the symbols of being a priestess. But she came to know she still had the ability.  
  
She felt aware also that she could still call on the Goddess for safety for herself and the child she carried. From that moment in the barge, dropping her pouch of gathered herbs into the lake, she had known that she would carry this child to birth if the Goddess so willed.  
  
Morgaine was reluctant to think of what the Goddess might have willed in causing her to conceive. Nor would she dwell on Viviane's plans for a child doubly born of the royal line of Avalon.  
  
  
Morgaine speaks...  
  
 _Although I know not whether she had been given the truth in a vision or only in the foreknowledge of her own ruthlessness, Viviane was right. I hated her then as much as I loved her. Her scheming and conviction of what should be willed to be had set me here, away from Avalon which I loved and which was home for me, alone and carrying myself and my child to an uncertain welcome._  
  
  
Yet Morgaine was welcomed at Lot's court and at first her time there was largely peaceful. While shadowed by the knowledge of having left behind Avalon, Morgaine found herself near to content. That was until winter deepened and increasingly the heavy weight of the child dragged at her.  
  
The chill of winter kept her huddled and thinning. She paid little attention to herself. There seemed no point in taking thread to her dress to make it hang better on her, or even in smoothing her hair. Nearly the whole of her energy now was taken up by resenting this cold wait for birth. Still sometimes she listened to the prattle of Morgause's youngest son, or carved for him a wooden toy.  
  
As Gareth described play adventures to his wooden knights, Morgaine wondered if her child, fostered here, would some day play thus. She would not then be sitting by the fire to watch.  
  
  
Worse than the dragging wait were the long pains of birthing. But she lived through those, and saw her child.  
  
Morgaine felt a desire strong as pain to hold her son. Yet from the first, the hurt of birthing still in her, she was not free to. Morgause said that the child must first learn to accept his wet nurse. Morgause told her he was still being tidied. Morgause gently said to her...  
  
Morgause was her kinswoman and was herself an experienced mother. Morgause loved her and surely knew best.  
  
Only years later did Morgaine dare admit to herself that other reasons might have hidden in Morgause's concern; by then Gywdion—Mordred—was long since grown and was in no important way hers. It might be that in truth he never could have been hers.  
  
Even at the time, there in Orkney, Morgaine was soon not deeply aware of her own child. Instead she remembered the Gwydion she had held when she was still a child herself.  
  
From the first time Igraine left Gwydion in Morgaine's care, Morgaine found that while her young brother was still a nuisance much of the time he became hers in a way no one else was. Her mother was only hers when Uther was away; Morgause most of the time paid little attention; the courtiers' respect lasted only to the surface; when he was present the High King himself, of course, barely spoke to her.  
  
But Gwydion followed her about and came to her for comfort. Even once he grew older he reached for her.  
  
  
In Avalon, Morgaine wondered if her brother would long remember her. That was not a question she would dare ask Viviane. Once, she did venture to mention her worry that he would be safe. She did not however ask that he might be happy, having herself known no full sense of that in her childhood before coming to Avalon.  
  
"Gwydion is being fostered in obscurity," Viviane reminded her, and said no further.  
  
Then, as the years unfurled, Morgaine had little thought to spare for Gywdion, so busy was she learning to be a priestess.  
  
  
Morgaine speaks...  
  
 _When I first came to Avalon I missed Gwydion, and for a time Viviane's toddling child Galahad was a comfort. Yet I had to find my own way, look to my own learning rather than busying myself with being present for a child. I was too young, then, and yet unlearned. I had other lessons as I grew in knowledge and towards the life of a sworn priestess._  
  
  
To meet her brother again in the aftermath of ritual, having been overshadowed and touched in ways Morgaine knew could be counted sin, rocked her deeply.  
  
Now at court she could not spend thought on Arthur's role as the king stag, nor think of the child she had borne by him and left to Morgause's care. Never could Morgaine allow her thoughts to turn to Gwydion when she held the spindle or might slip into unsought trance. She had to pretend she had no important secrets.  
  
  
Morgaine speaks...  
  
 _At that time at my brother's court I needed to act as if that there was a correct place for me under the Queen's watching. Yet in truth I did not belong there. Nor had I belonged in Orkney even with my own kinswoman and my child._  
  
 _While I remained so far from Avalon, there was indeed no place I belonged unless the Lady called me home._  
  



End file.
